Planning a Level

If you read the last guide, you should now have a few level ideas. If you consider ideas as the destination where you're heading, a level plan is the path you'll take to get there. Like a road trip, there are many factors to consider before setting out on your creating journey, like the following:

• What intermediate steps should I include while building?

• What resources should I use, and how should I plan my route?

• How do I account for detours?

When travelling you can't instantly go from your starting destination to the end goal (until teleportation is invented). In the same vein, when making a level you must break your idea into smaller steps that you'll accomplish. Levels don't just have one idea in them; they usually have other ideas with smaller scopes, which are used as secondary ideas.

If you just finished generating ideas, you'll have extras which can work as secondary ideas. However, they should be related to your main level idea. If you're making a level solely about fruit, your secondary ideas should be things like apples and oranges, not the heat-death of the universe.

Usually secondary ideas come in two forms: a specific idea which is used in an entire part of a level, or a general idea used throughout the whole level (but less important than the main idea). In Robtop's level Dash, the second swingcopter solely uses electricity objects and fireballs which counts as a secondary idea to the primary "fire & brimstone" aesthetic. Conversely, the pixel objects used throughout the level count as a general secondary idea - he could've made the whole level without using them, after all.

This idea of secondary ideas can be applied recursively, too; you can have tertiary ideas, quaternary ones, and so on - each with a smaller and smaller impact on the level at large. Usually these less impactful ideas don't need to be as relevant to the total level, such as easter eggs. Ultimately though, breaking your main ideas into smaller steps helps to flesh them out enough to establish specific things for your level, which is a massive time-saver for executing these ideas.

Before starting this section, let me remind you that more specific ideas will give you a better idea of how to plan & execute what you want, which saves lots of time and leads to better quality. Without this planning, you might as well just wing it, which is the equivalent of wandering around aimlessly; you waste time and other people judge you harshly. Even experienced creators can attest to this, such as Vaulity - here's her statement about her part in the mythic level Astralith:

I know I've made this point countless times, but I cannot stress it nearly enough. Failing to plan is the equivalent of planning to fail. This is true at any experience level, but even moreso when you're inexperienced.

Once you have your main idea and secondary ideas laid down, it's a good time to route out how your journey will look. Like a roadmap, you need to organize how you're going to get from point A to point B. Usually this involves stating your main idea, describing your level's individual parts, and allocating crucial resources. You can also use this template as a starting point for your plans.

I'll be using the level plan for Anarchy Road as an example for the rest of this guide. You can follow along with the plan through this link.

The first section of the document shows my main idea and the part breakdown with each set of secondary ideas. To summarize, here's the content of both:

• Main idea: The player journeys through a post-apocalyptic world, before witnessing its complete destruction.

  • Part 1: Scrapyard set in a polluted, burning wasteland

  • Part 2: Partly destroyed city, start near the rooftops and descend underground

  • Part 3: Destroyed sewer system, light streams in from above

  • Part 4: Fully intact city, player watches it get completely destroyed by storm

By this point your main idea should be fairly specific, as discussed in the last guide. You can also get more specific with your smaller ideas & incorporate them into your plan. In my case, an example of this is the asset list I included in the document. I also included sections for small & minute details as well - most of these were ideas which came to mind when I was away from the level, but I wanted to document for later.

Resources answer the "how" of planning a level. On a road trip you might bring a GPS, food & drink, and enough gasoline in your car to make it to your destination. In GD, these resources are IDs, layers, and objects.

Usually you don't need to explicitly plan these to the same extent as your ideas. Executing your ideas comes with experience and with it, you'll learn which resources you prefer to use when. For example, I and many people use Group 1 for invisible objects, but some people prefer keeping their Color 1 as pure black while I use Color 2 as pure black and leave Color 1 as white.

Depending on how complex your level plan is, you'll need to set aside more groups and color channels for specific, universal purposes. You may also need to document your resource uses within the level, or in a separate space. The more documentation you have, the easier it gets to take breaks from your level and resume work quickly. This is especially true of complex levels with hundreds or thousands of moving parts.

Levels can be as short as 10 seconds or as long as 3 minutes or more. As a result, you may not have enough space, resources, or time to fully communicate your main idea or secondary ideas. It's important to set your scope appropriately as a result.

The Tradeoff Triangle is a good representation of how tradeoffs work. With it, you can either have:

The most obvious example of this is the wait for Update 2.2. Robtop promised hundreds of features in the update, which initially was promised to be a "small update" after the year-long wait for the last one. He failed to prioritize quality over quantity, trying to add as many features into the update as possible – leading to a seven-year wait time and countless bugs upon release. A popular sentiment when the update finally came out was that people would have waited longer for an update with less bugs in it, which I personally agree with. 

To avoid outcomes like this, you must limit your scope and prioritize what matters. You cannot have everything at once; even if you can make a "perfect" level in a month with good quality and great optimization, you may still neglect other aspects of your life which isn't a tradeoff many can make. Your level's scope – the number of features you want to implement, along with your ambitions – needs to match your skill level and amount of free time.

There are two helpful ways to set your scope and prioritize when making plans: the MoSCoW method and Occam's Razor. MoSCoW is an acronym for the following:

• Must haves,

• Should haves,

• Could haves,

• Would haves.

When making a level, prioritize your must-have features first, then your should-haves, and so on. If you find yourself struggling to implement a non-essential feature, consider taking a break or scrapping it for a different feature. If you can't implement a must-have, consider how necessary it is for your level, and use Occam's Razor to assess your work. That is a topic for the next guide though, where it'll be covered in more detail.

Sometimes life throws a wrench into your plans, and you have to adjust accordingly.

On the road, this occurs with road closures, crashes, traffic, or even emergencies. You need to look at your route, assess whether it's worth continuing, and find a different path to your destination.

In Geometry Dash, "road closures" occur when an idea you had turns out to be much harder than expected, or even impossible. "Crashes" are like pushing forward on an idea that's far beyond your skill level or resources to implement, leading to an outcome far worse than you anticipated. "Traffic" is when many people have the same ideas as you; you can sit through it and still reach your destination, but you may want to take a more unique path. And emergencies are real-life situations which pull you away from the game, whatever those may be.

Whatever the detour, it's important to note that plans aren't set in stone. It's important to adjust how you'll make your level based on your circumstances, including if you'll finish it at all. Give yourself enough wiggle room to adjust and be flexible when you create, especially if your ideas aren't 100% pinned down or you don't have tons of experience. This is also why I don't leave specific implementation steps for in the guides, like tutorials do – after all, your journey through creating is a path only you can take.